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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104111631&sc=emaf
After 45 Years, A Guarneri Quartet FarewellListen Now
[12 min 7 sec]add to playlist
Dorothea von Haeften
After 45 years, the Guarneri Quartet is going on a farewell tour.
All Things Considered, May 17, 2009 - The members of the Guarneri Quartet at least its
three original members have known each other for a long time. They went to music school
together and, just for fun, played string quartets. Now, 45 years later, violinists Arnold
Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree, plus relative newcomer cellist Peter Wiley arestill playing concerts filled with Beethoven, Mozart, Dvorak and Schubert. But not for long.
This fall, the famed Guarneris are calling it quits. And, as they told NPR's Rebecca Roberts
recently during a rehearsal at the University of Maryland, it didn't take them long to make the
decision.
"I think we had about four minutes to decide," violist Michael Tree says. "Because we had to
be on stage this was backstage at a concert in New York and we had no trouble
agreeing immediately."
First violinist Steinhardt butts in to remind Tree that they did indeed "sleep on it," but when
they next talked about quitting, they all agreed quickly.
"I think we felt that it would be better to retire when we were still playing pretty well," Steinhardt
says. "You know a lot of people come backstage and say 'You shouldn't retire the concert
was so great.' Well, I always think, that's the time to retire. Forty-five years is a fantastic run.
Let's not be too greedy."
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The Guarneris (including original cellist David Soyer, who instructed Wiley) played music
together for fun at first, and Steinhardt says the idea of forming a string quartet in the 1960s,
when there weren't that many around, was an improbable dream. Eventually, their impromptu
performances became full-fledged concerts at school and elsewhere. As they began spending
more time together each year at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, Steinhardt says, the
formal establishment of the quartet "just happened."
It's often been said that playing in a string quartet is like being in a marriage. The advantages
include the ability to practically finish one another's musical sentences. But the challenge is
how to keep the musical marriage sounding fresh night after night and to keep the bickering to
a minimum.
"The intensity and the stress of always traveling together, rehearsing together, going to parties
together you know, you might have been sick and tired of me," Steinhardt says, addressing
his colleagues. "Maybe you are sick and tired of me?"
"Don't answer that," Dalley says.
But the question the Guarneris are often asked is how they do it how they've spent so many
decades working so closely together. Tree says the group never came up with a great answer."There are certain things that are quite obvious," Tree says. "We all have to have respect
mutual respect for each other. And we have to have a certain sameness, I think, of tastes. For
example, if there were someone in the group that were just gung-ho on playing very, very
experimental, avant-garde music, that could cause a little bit of dissension because that's an
entirely different outlook. I think we all basically agreed on just about everything, except when
it came down to the nitty-gritty of rehearsing. And that's when that question of mutual respect
comes into play and it becomes very important."
Steinhardt offered another explanation: "We are like four brothers in a family, and we are not
shy about saying 'That was too loud!' or 'We've got to fix that intonation there' or 'Why such a
quick tempo? Mozart didn't write a quick tempo!' So we're above board about all these things,
really like people in a family who can dismiss the polite stuff, you know?"
The Guarneri Quartet will give its final performances this October in Florida.
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Friday, April 24, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/23/AR2009042304281.html
The Guarneri, Bowing Out With Distinction
The Guarneri String Quartet, calling it quits after making music and recordings since the 1960s, performs tonight at the Clarice SmithCenter. (By Dorothea Von Haeften)
By Robert BatteySpecial to The Washington Post
As the venerable and venerated Guarneri Quartet completes its farewell season, giving its last
Washington area concert tonight at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, the passing is being
marked by a batch of rereleases of its vintage recordings.
ArkivMusic.com, a CD and download provider, has licensed a trove of the quartet's legendary RCA
recordings from its youthful heyday in the 1960s and '70s, when it was the greatest string quartet inthe world. The group's unprecedented success led to longevity: When David Soyer retired as cellist
in 2002 (replaced by Peter Wiley), the Guarneri had set a record for the longest tenure without a
personnel change of any major quartet.
The group has always been one of the highest distinction and has continued recording throughout itsexistence, but certainly the virtuosity and intensity of its last two decades were on a different level
than that heard in the first three. An entire generation has thus grown up being only dimly aware of
the volcanic musical force the Guarneri once represented. The ArkivMusic releases are the first
appearance of these iconic recordings since the LP era.
That is itself a scandal; RCA records (now enfolded into the Sony/BMG conglomerate) had adistinguished history of loyalty toward its top artists. Fritz Reiner, Artur Rubinstein and Jascha
Heifetz, among others, enjoyed long, productive relationships with the label, and their recordings
have never left the catalogues from the day they were first released, some of them passing through
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multiple formats. Chamber music is a less popular genre, but the Guarneri's preeminence and
uniqueness was fully comparable to those artists.
To be fair, the Guarneri's classic Beethoven quartet cycle has been available on CD, as have its
matchless recordings of chamber music with Rubinstein. But these eight new ArkivMusic releases,encompassing 34 works, bring back to our ears playing that has never been heard since, and which
should never have left the field. While the notion of "highlights" for material of this exalted level is
misplaced, both the Mendelssohn/Schumann and Brahms sets are the quintessential Guarneri, each
of the four artists taking wing on their solos, the tutti passages blazing with fervor.
The Guarneri certainly didn't invent great quartet playing. For the genre to be as vital, and for somany composers to have written so many masterpieces, there have to have been high-level
practitioners throughout its history. Famous soloists such as Joseph Joachim, Fritz Kreisler, William
Primrose, David Oistrakh and Janos Starker all spent time in quartets, and the Guarneri's mostcelebrated precursors included the Budapest, Italiano, Borodin and Amadeus quartets. But those
notwithstanding, what the Guarneri forged was something new.
The Guarneri operated on the principle that homogeneity was only one of many expressive tools.
Their individual sounds were simply too virile and colorful to be subsumed into some corporate
ideal. The group's hallmarks were the shimmering beauty of violinist Arnold Steinhardt's upperregister, the warmth and absolute security of John Dalley's supporting voice on second violin, the
soulful interjections of Michael Tree's viola, and cellist Soyer's gruff, sapient foundation. The
Guarneri's approach did not always reflect exactly what you saw in the score, but it drew out thedeepest humanity behind the notes. Each member was striving for an expressive ideal of beauty that
could at times seem in conflict with notions of perfect quartet protocol. The result was a churning,
boiling intensity, from which it was impossible to turn away lest you miss a single phrase.